This invention relates to a method and apparatus for dynamically tuning an acoustic echo canceller.
In telephony, an echo is a reflection of the voice signal. It is a delayed copy of the original. An example scenario is illustrated in FIG. 1a, which shows a signal being captured by a far-end microphone and output by a near-end loudspeaker. The echo is a consequence of acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone; the microphone captures the signal originating from its own loudspeaker in addition to the voice of the near-end speaker and any background noise. The result is an echo at the far-end loudspeaker. Echo cancellation is an important feature of telephony. Hands-free devices and teleconferencing, in particular, require echo cancellation that can adapt to environments having a wide range of acoustic characteristics.
Acoustic echo cancellers typically synthesise an estimate of the echo from the far-end voice signal. The estimated echo is then subtracted from the microphone signal. This technique requires adaptive signal processing to generate a signal accurate enough to cancel the echo effectively. An adaptive filter is often used to model the environment's acoustic impulse response. The adaptive filter is often followed by a non-linear processor (NLP) for removing any residual echo. The non-linear processor may be accompanied by a comfort noise generator (CNG), since periods of complete silence can be disconcerting for a user.
The performance of the echo canceller depends on the platform, and particularly on the audio interface, the interface driver and related hardware, the pre and post amplifier (if any), and characteristics of microphone and speaker. It is challenging to achieve full duplex voice communication on a wide variety of platforms with sufficient echo cancellation. Therefore, the majority of echo cancellers require some form of platform-specific tuning to provide optimal performance. Often, this platform specific tuning has to be performed manually.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved method for tuning an acoustic echo canceller.